The Children’s Author Who Actually Listens to Children

Very early in the morning of Memorial Day, 1995, the children’s author Lois Lowry was awakened by a telephone call from Germany. It was still dark outside the windows of her little brick house in Cambridge, Mass., when she heard her daughter-in-law explain that Lowry’s son Grey, an Air Force flight instructor, died when his F-15 crashed on takeoff.

The next day, Lowry and her family were on a plane to Germany to bury her son. But when the Air Force asked Lowry to return to Germany a year later to testify against the two mechanics the military charged with negligent homicide in Maj. Donald Grey Lowry’s death, she refused.

The mechanics had attached two control rods into the wrong sockets — a problem caused more by sloppy design than by sloppy mechanical work. Those same control rods nearly caused two previous crashes, and multiple reports had recommended easy fixes. The Air Force ignored those suggestions until Grey Lowry’s death but still made an example of the mechanics — court-martialing them and withholding crucial information from the defense team. The day the trial was meant to begin, one of the mechanics shot himself in the head. He left a note to the Lowry family that read: “I know I am going to heaven. And in heaven I cannot hurt anyone else, not even by accident.”

Seventeen years later, on a sunny summer morning in a house across the street from the home where she received that phone call, Lois Lowry told the story of her son and his death, and someone else’s son’s death, quietly and carefully. She had no-nonsense short gray hair and wore a bright blue T-shirt; her face was ruddy from working in the garden before my arrival. On the floor, her dog lolled in a patch of sun. “The woman prosecuting the case called me several times, and she wanted me to come over and testify,” she said. “I’m not sure I felt that the trial should be taking place. It put me in a very awful position.” In the end, Lowry wrote a letter, which was never read during the proceedings because the charges against the second mechanic were eventually dropped. “Thank God I wasn’t there,” she said, remembering that during a pretrial hearing the prosecutor left photos of her son’s body on a desk where the mechanics could see them. “Isn’t that a horrible story?” she asked. “What purpose did it serve, other than to create more tragedy?”

When Lowry lost her son, she had recently published “The Giver,” a slim novel about a boy in an isolated community discovering the terrible secrets behind the pleasant, emotionless life he and his friends live. In “The Giver,” Jonas, upon his 12th birthday, is apprenticed to the title character — the repository of the community’s collective memory and the one man who remembers what it was like when citizens experienced love, sadness, danger, death, lust. (Even color is a mystery to most of the community.) When Jonas learns that Gabriel, a fussy baby he has come to love, is slated for extermination, he kidnaps Gabriel and escapes into an uncertain future.

Since that book’s 1994 Newbery Medal, it has become a classic — selling millions ofcopies worldwide, landing on the curriculum of countless schools (and being challenged or banned at many more for its message of distrust for authority) and leading a wave of dystopian children’s literature, most of which has little in common with Lowry’s plain-spoken stories.

In two subsequent novels, “Gathering Blue” and “Messenger,” Lowry explored other communities in the same postapocalyptic world. This fall, Lowry will publish “Son,” the final novel in what’s now being called the Giver Quartet, and together the four books make a quiet masterpiece — a corrective of sorts to “The Hunger Games” and other movie-adaptation-ready Y.A. series. Where those books feature violent death and armed rebellion, the battle that Gabriel fights in “Son” is one in which empathy and love are his only weapons. And where “The Hunger Games” features a romantic triangle among three fierce revolutionaries, “Son” highlights the undying love of a mother for her child and the child’s for his mother.

“The fact that I lost my son permeates my being,” Lowry told me. And that loss permeates “Son” as well. It’s a book of longing in the guise of an adventure. Children will love it. It will break their parents’ hearts.

In 1978, just after Lowry published her first book and divorced her husband, she was asked to deliver the eighth-grade commencement speech at her local middle school in Maine. She was preceded to the lectern by the principal, who told the bored, uncomfortable kids that these were their golden years. When Lowry spoke, she told them the principal was misleading them. These weren’t their golden years at all. At best they were a dull beige. She reminisced about her own eighth-grade year, when she was obsessed with a girl in her class who had enormous breasts when Lowry had none.

The kids laughed. But when Lowry looked out at the parents, she later wrote, “their faces were like concrete.” She realized that day that she could talk to kids or she could talk to adults, but not to both: “And so I chose the kids.”

It’s a lesson that seems antithetical to this era of dual-tracked children’s stories — a time when 55 percent of all young-adult novels are bought by full-grown adults, when children’s movies are expected to entertain the parents even as the tots load up on popcorn. And so we end up with entertainment like the “Hunger Games” series, or the latter “Harry Potter” movies — thrilling adult stories with kids unnervingly placed in the middle of them. Smaller children get the “Madagascar” movies, in which urbane penguins drop pop-culture jokes into formulaic plot.

Think of the Giver Quartet instead as a fable exploring elemental forces with great care. It’s a story to which many parents may be slow to warm but one that kids will remember their entire lives.

Lowry began “Son” with a mind toward writing about teenage Gabriel, who is curious about his origins and itching to leave the peaceful refuge where he and Jonas ended up. But soon she was looking backward to the mother Gabriel left behind — Claire, never mentioned in “The Giver,” set as it was in a community where pregnancy is left to “birthmothers” whose children are given away unseen to stable, state-selected families. So Lowry set aside the Gabriel chapters (they later became the last third of the book) and concentrated on Claire’s story, the story of a young woman who has lost a son. “I wasn’t aware of it at the time,” she said in her sitting room, pointing to her own heart, “but when I was writing of her yearning to find her boy, that was coming out of my own yearning to have my own son back.”

Claire’s quest to find Gabriel again — and her struggle to decide what to say to him when she does — forces her to decide what she is willing to sacrifice in order to rejoin her child. Scenes of an older, transformed Claire quietly watching her son from a distance are touching even before you consider them in the context of Lowry, now 75, and Grey, buried 17 years ago a wide ocean away from Cambridge. I asked her about the novel’s moving final scene, and she smiled. Behind her glasses her eyes were bright and blue. “Maybe that was wishful thinking on my part,” she said.

Though any parent ought to love the message of “Son” — with its mother and child seeking each other desperately through distance and time — many parents haven’t loved the message of “The Giver.” For nearly 20 years it has been near the top of the American Library Association’s list of banned and challenged books, with objections raised particularly to a frightening scene in which a troublesome baby is euthanized. But Lowry thinks that’s window dressing for adults’ real problem with the book. “What I think they’re really objecting to is the fact that a young person is rejecting the authority and wisdom of the governing body,” she said. “That’s unnerving to them.”

“The Hunger Games,” meanwhile, is squarely in the family tree of “The Giver” but a thousand times more violent and disturbing — and a thousand times less artful. “I’m not terribly conversant with children’s literature in general,” Lowry said. “I tend to read books for adults, being an adult.” But she read the first book in Suzanne Collins’s megasuccessful trilogy as a judge for a literary prize. “I could certainly see why kids love it. It’s suspenseful. The plot moves right along. But I was troubled by the fact that it’s children killing children.” She says this so matter-of-factly that I’m reminded anew of the absurdity of the fact that parents should be outraged at such a story, yet millions of them have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on books and movies in which children murder other children for sport. (I’ve spent about $75 myself.)

And these days it seems, Lowry pointed out, that every young-adult book published is a dystopian thriller packed with action sequences. “And that’s why they’re getting made into movies and mine has been out in Hollywood for 16 years — they can’t figure out where the action is.” (“The Giver” has been under continuous option since it was published. Once, the producers told Lowry they were hoping Haley Joel Osment might play 12-year-old Jonas; Osment is now 24.) “I think I’ve written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action,” she said. “I’m an introspective person.”

The confrontation that concludes the Giver Quartet is a face-off between Gabriel and the sinister Trademaster — a climactic battle made perfectly unfilmable by the fact that Gabriel refuses to fight. Instead he uses the “veer,” a magical talent in which he is able to enter another person’s consciousness and feel what they feel. That is, Gabriel battles evil with empathy.

“The ability to understand other people’s feelings,” Lowry said. “As an encompassing gift that a kid could have — or a human — that could be the one that could save the world. If we could all acquire it to the extent that boy had it, no one would go into a movie theater with a gun.” It’s a powerful lesson, and one that I’m eager for my children — so often so quick to think only of themselves — to learn. It’s surely one I still need to learn. Perhaps these books are for adults after all.

The Giver Quartet is, in the end, less a speculative fiction than a kind of guide for teaching children (and their parents, if they’re listening carefully) how to be a good person. I think back not just to Lowry’s son but also to the other son that accident claimed, the mechanic prosecuted for Grey Lowry’s death. His name was Thomas Mueller. He had a wife and two young children. “Every second of every minute of every day, I fall apart a little more,” he wrote in the notebook he kept during the trial. When he sat in that courtroom, he, too, felt sad and scared.

A version of this article appears in print on October 7, 2012, on page MM52 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Amazing Adventures in Empathy. Today's Paper|Subscribe